The Enfranchised

Why isn't the VC community talking about Shark Tank?

2010-01-31T12:06:00.003-05:00

Shark Tank is a major-network, prime-time show about Venture Capital. So with all the great VC/entrepreneur bloggers and twitter(er)s, why isn't anyone buzzing about it?

A description: a small businessperson comes to 5 rich people (the "sharks") with their business and an offer (e.g. $48k for a 25% stake). The businessperson pitches their idea. The sharks ask questions ("how much do you sell in a day?" "how much does it cost to make this?"). The sharks make counter offers (most involve the same amount of money for at least a 51% stake). They show off their advantages ("you want me to invest because I know retail, and you're a retailer"). Isn't this the kind of transparency that we want?

Now, yes, it's a bad show. The sharks brag about the great deals they've made and how rich they are, without mentioning the fact that, say, he made his money by selling at the peak of the bubble and Mattel's acquisition of his company "has been called one of the worst acquisitions in corporate history."

But this is major network tv. We need bad shows to rally around, so that there will be less popular but better shows. For instance, Saturday Night Live. Sucks. But it takes there being an SNL for there to be a Dana Carvey show (which featured Steve Carrell and Stephen Colbert).

And yes, it's not about tech. It's about consumer retail and people making stuffed animals with cubby holes so that kids can organize their playroom by anally fisting a monkey. That's not interesting to the tech crowd. It's not really interesting to any crowd.

But this is the first show that has people present business plans, then criticize them, and giving you a glimpse into how capitalists think and operate. Shouldn't we be singing ABC's praises for giving us even this?

Dan's advice on Resume Writing.

2010-01-21T14:58:00.002-05:00

It's intern-hiring season, so I'm reading more resumes at work and for friends. Here are some thoughts I have.

[These are my thoughts, not necessarily my employer's. And check out Steve Yegge's tips for a longer but better-written piece.]

One Page.

Your resume fits on a page. "But I need more than one page--" No, you don't. Either you're junior enough that you can fit it on a page, or you're awesome enough that you don't even need to list every detail. (Exception: researchers. Then you're working more on a CV than a resume.) Yes, this will mean cutting down on stuff. And as you get older, it will mean cutting stuff out. Your awesome responsibilities as a lifeguard at the pool were important when you were a sophomore, not when you're a 30 year-old.

Each word should give someone a reason to want to hire you.

Go re-read your resume with that in mind.

Give me what I need, but not too much.

Yes, you need the keywords to be in there. Tell me you were a software engineer. Tell me what languages you know. But you don't need to tell me that a software engineer "designs, implements, and verifies software code to" yadda yadda.

Give me hooks.

Here's where I diverge most from Steve's advice. There are two uses of the resume. One is to get the interview. The next is to make the interview better. For the first part, you want to trim the fat. For the second, you want to leave what I call "hooks". Interesting sentences that will make your interviewer look down at your resume, then look up at you and say, "huh, this is interesting." Then, it's your time to shine. On my resume, I have hooks for small talk ("Opened for The Who"), and then hooks for what I care about ("enjoy tackling low-hanging technical fruit to bring about societal change").

My resume screener won't care about these hooks. And they probably won't even come up on a first-pass interview (where the interviewer cares more if I've ever actually seen a computer). But when I'm talking with someone who knows I can code, and wants to know if I can code the right things, this is a useful sentence. Put enough of yourself on the page so an interviewer will give you the chance to come out in person.

Go back, cut it down again.

OK, you have a resume. Now go back and fix it, cause it's probably still bad. No, seriously, 15 minutes now will get you farther faster. Basically, candidates write what they think resume readers want to see. Stop that. Write what you'd want to read.

Steve (linked above, also here) spends a lot of time on the bad writing that pervades many resumes. Go read that. I'll wait. Back? Good. Now, take out your resume, reread each word, and cut it out unless you can convince your antagonistic alter ego that it's truly necessary.

Share, and look at other people's.

The best way to get a better resume is to ask the 5 people you most admire (in a similar job/field) to see their resumes. You'll probably go "oooh, that looks nice". Then stop and think about what makes it nice. Copy those attributes shamelessly. Then, the next time a friend asks for resume help, say, "okay, and here's mine, so you can see what I like in resumes." (This also has the side benefit of making you keep yours up-to-date)

For better encryption key distribution, look to Leisure Suit Larry. [a response to Bruce Schneier]

2010-01-11T09:26:00.004-05:00

A few months ago, there was an uproar over our Predator drones in Afghanistan broadcasting video unencrypted. Techies coast-to-coast were a-twitter with glee that the military-industrial complex can't do anything right. Bruce Schneier put them in their place by pointing out that this data comes with an expiration date. We only need it stay encrypted for a few hours/days. He suggested a whole new key exchange system for this sort of data.

Here's my proposal: go back to the classics. I'm referring, of course, to the 1987 softcore software magnum opus Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards. An adventure game in the vein of other Sierra On-Line franchises of the day (Kings Quest, Space Quest, Police Quest), it added one very important aspect: boobies. And to avoid the label of smut-peddlers, it added a CAPTCHA-esque ingenuity I think we'd do well to remember.

When you wanted to play the game, you entered your age. And then, it tested you on it. So if you said you were 25, it would ask you questions about the popular music of 10 years earlier. You could claim you were 18, but if you had the pop-cultural IQ of a 10 year-old, you were still locked out.

Predators should send out an encrypted video signal and a hint for the key. This could rest on cultural knowledge of American pop culture, or more specifically it could rely on the specific units the video was made for. You can search Wikipedia for Britney Spears's hit 1999 signal, but can you for, say, the nickname of the commanding general of the 10th Mountain Division?

This isn't industrial grade crypto. But it's a way to give out keys for data whose security has a lifetime of hours, not decades.

[ This is also related to the concept of a Shibboleth. I also vaguely remember, but couldn't find a story from WWII: Germans who'd learned American accent-free would be dressed up in looted American uniforms. They would have been made familiar with American military protocol. So US soldiers started asking them questions like "who won the National League Pennant in 1938." ]

Why isn't Airport Utility 5.5 on the web? [Apple Fail]

2009-12-31T06:05:00.004-05:00

Airport Utility is software to administer Apple hardware. It's included with the hardware, and posted on the web. Except for the version I need.

[Apologies, faithful reader(s?), but this post is a diversion from the normal flow(trickle?) of Enfranchised posts. Instead, it's for the internet reader who landed here after performing a WWW search using the engine of their choice.]

Earlier this year, I:

bought a Time Capsule (a router/WiFi base station/hard drive). Specifically, the 2009 Time Capsule update.
installed Airport Utility (the software to administer the Time Capsule) from the included DVD.
cleaned up my apartment and threw out the DVD, because physical media is for suckers.
found my copy of Airport Utility got downgraded (perhaps during my Snow Leopard upgrade?)

At http://support.apple.com/downloads/#airport , you can download many versions of Airport Utility. But not 5.5. The latest there is 5.4.1, which works with many Apple Wireless base stations. But not mine. So, until they do post it, my options are:

download a torrent of Airport Utility 5.5 (probably with viruses)
buy a new Time Capsule (right)
borrow DVD from a friend (I don't think I have any with this Time Capsule)
beg Apple support. (I'll update later)

But, why? This software is useless without an expensive piece of Hardware/Apple Profit. Other versions are public for free download. What is it about Airport Utility 5.5, specifically, that it can't be released for download?

Maybe it:

has secret data embedded Apple doesn't want you to see. (Unless you've paid the $300)
is a retail strategy to get me to buy it again. (This is so frustrating that I'm close.)
would cost too much bandwidth to offer for free download. (Unlike every other version of the same software).

Or, maybe, this update to Airport Utility is just stuck in App Review.

Three Ways to Fix the Airport Security Problem (aka Trains with Rockets)

2009-12-26T16:31:00.005-05:00

In the wake of another terror attempt, the TSA is locking down flights. Reports of the regulations include:

no electronics
no standing in the last hour of a flight
only one carry-on bag

These make traveling a lot less attractive: over the past 20 years, a coast-to-coast trip has gotten less convenient. The trip now takes longer (airplanes haven't gotten faster, and I'm more constrained in what I can do).

I see 3 ways to return to the era of luxurious and sumptuous transcontinental travel:

1) Bring sanity to Airport Security. Yeah, this might happen. OK, next solution.

(Oh hey, it turns out that when a problem is hard to solve, it's easier to go around it)

2) Build faster planes. If flying New York to San Francisco took, say, 2 hours, then it's fine not to have your computer. But Concorde tried this, and, well, kind of failed.

3) Screw you, planes. Major airlines already operate a hub-and-spoke model. You know what else uses fixed routes? Trains. You know what have more room than planes? Trains. You know what are almost as fast as planes? Trains with Rockets.

Yes yes yes, trains are more fuel efficient than planes. Do Americans care about fuel efficiency? No. We care about convenience and awesome. Trains with Rockets have both. Heck, I'd even be fine with Trains with Jet engines. Yes, I know they'll never be as fast as planes. But you'll have more leg room. A red-eye will be doable. And you'll get to arrive/leave in city centers. C'mon Mr. President, this massive civil works project is one I can believe in.

Electronics aren't a threat to Planes

2009-12-12T12:51:00.002-05:00

[ I've been traveling a lot recently, so excuse me some travel posts ]

"Oh noes! Electronics might cause plane crashes!" Someone somewhere thought this, and now you have to turn off electronics during and after take-off and landing. Yes, it's annoying. And it's not even clear that electronics are bad.

"Well, maybe electronics don't mess it up after all. But as long as there's a risk, shouldn't we be prudent? You can't live without your iPhone game for 20 minutes?" This is a common sense attitude. And it's wrong. Let's take a look at why.

If this attitude worked, the FAA would just say "you can bring bombs on planes, but just don't use them." Of course, terrorists wouldn't listen to this.

So why don't they bring cell phones onto planes, leave them on during takeoff/landing, and crash them? Why has 24 never featured someone jumping up on a plane and saying "I have an electronic device, and I'm not afraid to leave it on!" There are three possibilities:

Electronics aren't a threat to planes.
The DHS is wildly incompetent.
Cell phones know when they're being held by terrorists, and emit less harmful electromagnetic radiation.

This is a lesson in thinking about security: if you won't plan for the worst case (terrorist with a souple-up radio transmitter), there's no point planning for the average case (tourist with an iPod). So why don't Amazon and Apple lobby for people to be allowed to continue to use their Kindles and iPods?

Why does eBay allow sniping?

2009-11-20T06:22:00.002-05:00

5 hours left on this auction (I'd give you the link, but then you'd bid against me!) and I am sweating bullets. Why? Because eBay is a jackass. Or eBay are jackasses. Look, eBay behaves jackasserly. With great jackasseritude. How? They end the auction at a fixed time.

I get what they're trying to do: create the atmosphere of exciting bidding by letting people know when to come watch the end of the auction.

The problem? They haven't attracted people, they've attracted computers. People set up auto-bidders that wait until a fraction of a second before the auction ends and then bid it up. This destroys the "thrill of the bid"

So, honest question, why does eBay let this happen? Here's my proposal: if a bid comes in with less than two minutes left in the auction, the auction gets extended for two minutes. Bam, no worrying if you'll get beat without the chance to respond.

This would take off the pressure to bid "in secret" and have to wait until the end.

So... what's the deal, eBay?

How Obama Earned the Nobel Peace Prize

2009-10-12T01:42:00.000-05:00

My theory on how Obama Earned the Nobel Peace Prize

The most dressed up gimp joke you'll hear all day

2009-10-05T05:25:00.000-05:00

Renowned physicist and best-selling author Stephen Hawking retired last month, after hitting the mandatory retirement age of 69. After having been the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University for 30 years, he'll be missed in the small college town. But he'll also be missed at rival English university Oxford, where he was widely recognized at being single-handedly responsible for their 30-year winning streak in the annual Cambridge-Oxford Mathematics Department Cricket match.

Give me perspective!

2009-09-30T00:16:00.002-05:00

It's frustrating that stock chart graphs make it clear when a stock went up and when it went down, but not by how much. If the line goes down to the bottom of the graph, it might be alright (the opening bell just rang, and it's down .01%), or it might be horrific (the company went bankrupt).

Why not have a convention of showing not only the opening-value as a line, but the opening-value +/- mean volatility as lines of different colors. Show me the equator, plus the tropics of cancer and capricorn!

"East Palo Alto police buy back guns"

2009-09-29T12:59:00.000-05:00

This headline, "East Palo Alto police buy back guns"...

Is it just me, or does it make it sound like: the Chief of the EPA PD made the conscious decision to sell the department's guns (perhaps because of idealism). Then the next day, he awakens from his fairy-dream-slumber, realizes that police need guns (especially in East Palo Alto), and suddenly they're going around, hat-in-hand, kindly asking to get their firearms back?

The Point/Counterpoint of the Future

2009-09-28T21:30:00.002-05:00

Every generation (well, every five years) needs its commentators-at-loggerheads. The 90's had James Carville/Mary Matalin. The 00's had Hannity/Colmes. Today we have Hannity... and more Hannity!

This is the part where I predict the future. Right-wing Pundit, law professor, semi-notable actor, and former-haver-of-Money-that-can-be-won Ben Stein will be the perfect offset to Liberal good-humor-writer-and-mediocre-actor* turned Senator Al Franken, in a show that can only be called...

...Franken-Stein!

*though he's a fantastic actor when he's being Mick Jagger

The Third Path: Restoring Bank Confidence; Compensation

2009-09-28T03:50:00.004-05:00

[In The Third Path, we examine both sides of an issue, and find a third (and better) solution]

The Great Depression taught us that the public needs to trust banks. When the '08 Recession hit, we knew we had to help the banks. We thought maybe reducing excessive executive pay would help.

The wise bank executives took a moment from snorting cocaine off the tits of prostitutes made of diamonds while riding on a yacht made of endangered rhinoceros tusk to helpfully point out that it would be folly to cut costs. If we were to reduce their paycheck by even one zero, the best bankers would be so insulted they would quit! We'd be left with the second-rate bankers. These second-rate bankers, you understand, are simply unable to do what the first-rate bankers do (that is, lose billions of dollars. Why, Jim over there worked every day in 2008 and only cost the economy $87 million. Ha!).

In the heat of the moment, we went down the second path. But let's think of a Third Path, now that things have gotten so crazy. (How crazy are they?) They're so crazy that the FDIC wants to borrow money from the banks. This is the equivalent of the fox asking the hen to come over and housesit, because the fox is thinking a vacation would be nice but gets a lot of mail and needs his plants watered. Well, time to strike while the iron is crazy... here's the two-point Bentley Plan.

Let banks pay executives as much as they will take.
When any bank goes belly-up, their executives get punished according to how much money they got paid in the 12 months that they allowed the bank to fail, according to this schedule:

<$500,000: Anyone who invested money in the bank can give them a wet willy
$500,000-$1 million: Need to spend 5 minutes in a small room with an angry porcupine
$1-3 million: Knees broken. (At this level, the executive ought to appreciate the irony that this is the punishment that befalls the smallest of debtors: the loan shark customer)
$3-10 million: A pound of flesh is taken. (At this level, the sophisticated executive simply must appreciate the Merchant of Venice allusion)
$10-20 million: Shot in the head. In front of everyone they have ever loved.
>$20 million: Shot in the head. In front of everyone they have ever loved. While wearing a clown suit.

This is a classic example of "aligning incentives". If you, as a depositor, hear that your bank president was paid $34 million last year, you can be thrilled that your banks is still healthy. Because, as the saying goes, "who wants to be killed while wearing a clown suit?"

Headlines, obviously a large part of Deborah Sontag's eagle eye

2009-09-28T02:23:00.004-05:00

"When Life Names You Lemon" is an article about a memoirist who, well, I don't know. I haven't read it.

I just saw the pitch on the front page: "Lemon Andersen, the child of heroin addicts, is now a memoirist." I'm pretty sure the author (one Deborah Sontag) wrote it for the headline. So that's what I read.

Why I follow @aplusk and not @cnnbrk

2009-04-16T22:56:00.004-05:00

I'm on twitter as @dbentley. Recently, there's been a race between Ashton Kutcher and CNN for who can be the first account to have 1 million followers. As of this writing, it's neck and neck.

Personally, I follow @aplusk (Ashton Kutcher) and not @cnnbrk (CNN). Why?

CNN isn't anything new. It's headlines. It's a wire service. It's an RSS feed limited to <>
It doesn't try to be anything more. It follows one account. It doesn't interact with the community. Yeah, you "get" the internet. But by that CNN doesn't mean "understanding", it means "getting more eyeballs".

Ashton is creating community and interacting with it. I'm not sure where Twitter's going, but I know that Ashton's leading and CNN's coasting.

Not an important posting

2009-01-16T18:51:00.003-05:00

Kraft Mac and Cheese has premium flavors. And they're good. And yet, the premium flavors cost the same at my local store ($1.89). One of them even includes an extra .05 oz net wt. How is the premium mac and cheese not more expensive to make? Or does Kraft simply believe in their product so much that they are subsiziding it?

Idea for the Golden Globes

2009-01-12T01:28:00.003-05:00

The Golden Globes have separate awards for Best Dramatic Picture and Best Comedic Picture. My impression is that, were they forced to choose a Best Picture, most years it would be the Best Dramatic Picture winner, and so that category is viewed as "higher". Even though some years, it might maybe...

Well, why don't we try. I think that if you're voting for the Golden Globes, then you should vote for each category separately, and also choose one of them as Best Picture. Then, they should disqualify the Best Picture winner as winning its category. Instead, they would award Best Dramatic Picture winner to the second-place in that category (in years that Dramatic picture won Best Picture).

This would mean that the cast and crew of a Best Dramatic Picture would want to win. But they'd also kinda want to lose, in the hopes that they won Best Picture (which would be announced later).

I think this would make for much cooler shots where some directors would be a little bit happy they lost Best Dramatic Picture. Until they later lost Best Picture, too. To Mamma Mia!

The tears of heart-broken actresses can cure... well, nothing. But they sure make me laugh.

An Honest-to-God Constitutional Crisis!

2009-01-04T08:42:00.004-05:00

Man, Rod Blagojevich is a Dick. Determined to go down swinging, he appoints Roland Burris, whose only weakness is sympathizing with that Dick Rod Blagojevich. And suddenly, though no one wants to say it, we have a Constitutional Crisis on our hands. I'm no lawyer, but here's my thinking.

The two major points seem to be:

the Constitution, which states that each house of Congress is "the Judge of the Elections, Returns, and Qualifications of its own members". Great, easy enough. The Senate gets to decide everything. Except nope, because the second major point...
Powell v. McCormack says that Congress only gets to test the Qualifications set in the Constitution (older than such and such age, citizen of X state for at least Y months, etc.), and can't set the barbarous Qualification of "you can't have been kicked out of Congress before". Meh, not sure I agree with the decision, but hey, it's the Law of the Land.

Almost all of the analyses I've seen have been trying to fit the current conditions to the contours of Powell v. McCormack. But what people haven't been mentioning is "Political Question", the doctrine by which the Supreme Court can choose not to decide a case because it has no right to interfere. Somewhere, that clause has to give a house in Congress a right to act in some way to exclude members (or else it wouldn't have been included). And when it exercises that right, it is "the Judge".

That's scary. Because that means that once it figures out exactly the limits of that power, within that realm its power is absolute. And can't be checked. And can be wielded for political purposes. Could someone explain to me why a majority of the Senate couldn't get together and say to prospective Senators (presumably of the other party): "I'm sorry, we don't believe your birth certificate. We think you're 29, and therefore unable to serve in this Senate; better luck never."?

We like Checks and Balances. But it seems here that the Constitution has said "there is an area here where each House is the final authority". I think that's the heart of the issue. At some point, the Supreme Court has to let each House make its own mistakes, and let them card members-elect and then act like dicks, and then have the system come crumbling down with a new amendment that will create an alternative system that has its own pitfalls. Oh Constitutional Crisis, you're so fun to hypothesize about!

Why do Unions like Pensions?

2008-12-21T12:58:00.002-05:00

I understand why people like pensions. You work for a while, then you get to retire, and you don't have to worry.

But there's also lock-in. You only get the pension if you stay with a company. Through good times, and bad. maybe it's not a fun place to work anymore. Maybe it's downright horrid. But if you stay for another four years, you get your pension, so you stay.

Why is that good for employees? Wouldn't it be better to have fluidity (on the part of the workers) so that they can apply not just short-term pressure (strikes) but long-term pressure (retention)?

Or is this a situation where the structure of a union has incentives not aligned with the rank-and-file workers? (Because if you leave the company, you might fall under a different union representative, or a different union)

Vista and Silverlight: two tastes that really ought to not be forced together

2008-12-17T02:59:00.005-05:00

I'm kind of interested in the Mojave Experiment. Microsoft went out and showed people "Mojave" and how much better it was than Vista, their never-got-off-the-ground-acceptance-wise OS. And then, "surprise", Mojave is Vista, Soylent Green is People, and Bob is Your Uncle.

A friend was looking for a computer and asking about Vista and with how much vigor she ought avoid it. My understanding is that much of the backlash is because it's hard to get things working with Vista if you upgrade, but if you get it on a computer you'll be fine. I was hoping to give her some ciation towards this, and so went to http://www.mojaveexperiment.com/ .

And it requires Silverlight. Microsoft's other latest technology. If you're trying to convince slow adopters, why would you use a different early adopter technology?

It's such a great idea, with such a head-in-the-sand implementation.

[These views are my own and not my employer's; though I hope they become yours. Because I'm right.]

Words' Resurgence

2008-12-15T02:46:00.003-05:00

I'm reading George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London. It's a (slightly fictionalized, it turns out) telling of his time being poor in... Paris and London. Good book, and even though I sometimes disagree with Orwell I never regret the time I spent reading him.

Two big thoughts have struck me:

1) I could make a lot of money compiling a guide to English funny currency. What the hell is a bob? And a crown? What's five and sixpence mean? And a quid? (In fact, I know the answers to most of these). But a Creative Commons-licensed (non-commercial) essay describing the universe and lexicon, along with a per-decade commentary on economics (so you can know how much 4 pounds is in each time period, say) would be awesome. I imagine that, written well enough, and licensed cheaply enough, you could allow editors to include it in editions of... basically any English Literature book ever.

2) I got to this passage: "And instantly [] the tramps began to misbehave[]. All round the gallery men lolled in their pews, laughed, chattered..." Loll is a verb, meaning to lounge around, but in that context it seemed so much to presage "lol" as in "omfg lol" that I wondered if I hadn't gotten a copy of the book remixed a la Laugh-Out-Loud Cats. It just all worked so well: a book about tramps that was in the context of laughing by a writer who thought so much about language (yes, 1984, but also its underappreciated precursor "Politics and the English Language".

So, George (nee Eric), tell me, is newspeak really a foreshadowing of teenage girl speak? My hat, as ever, is off to you.

Q&A with Chris Onstad

2008-12-12T14:43:00.002-05:00

Recently, Chris Onstad, author of Achewood (the best webcomic ever) stopped by the New York office. I was fortunate enough to be given the chance to ask him dumb questions, and watch him turn them into amazingly intelligent and literate answers. Check it out.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2ZOSZZTIiE

Why I Support Universal Healthcare

2008-10-26T22:02:00.002-05:00

It's basically a three-step logical process.

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
When people get really sick, we (as a society) will have to pay for the cure.
So we might as well pay for the prevention.

So, if you disagree with Universal Health Care, and I know there are a lot of you out there who do, which of these three do you disagree with?

Evil Audubon Society

2008-08-21T00:30:00.001-05:00

You should check out The Evil Audubon Society, sometimes misspelled as The Evil Autobahn Society.

Top Gun Analogies, taken too far

2008-05-03T18:08:00.001-05:00

The Kentucky Derby is rife with potential for comparison to the 1987 cinematic coup de grace "Top Gun".

"I feel the need. The need for speed." Straightforward resemblance to the sport of ponies.

So perhaps it is no surprise that jockey Kent Desormeaux, riding the back of Big Brown (the favorite who went on to win it), chose to commentate a replay of the race by comparing his run to Tom Cruise in that fateful film. Quoth the short, fast man: "I'm locked on now. [] And all I've got to do is pull the trigger."

Eight Belles, the filly who took second place, broke both of her front ankles was immediately put down after two equine ambulances pulled out onto Churchill Downs's track.

It's with a deep understanding of how bad a person I am that I imagine all of the ways I could recast Iceman (played memorably by Val Kilmer)'s line of:

"The plaque for second place is in the women's bathroom."